Meeting people, facing facts.

July 21^st. 2018

The book talk at Littlehampton went well. The photo here shows me with two of our Chindi authors, Helen Christmas and Christine Hammacot. About twenty people turned up (there are others out of

shot sitting in the comfortable armchairs at the back of the room) and were quite an attentive audience. You always unearth someone who has written a full length novel at these events, but are too shy or afraid to admit it. One of our audience had written eight novels, and none of them were published; he said he just liked the idea of writing. Bit like stamp collecting I suppose. I managed to sell one book, and that was to a chap who had never written a book, but just wanted to listen to us talk about ourselves. The event was part of the Littlehampton Festival during which our group held four events, including a ‘Ghost Tour’. Spooky, eh?

I still haven’t seen an improvement in my AMS sales, so have contacted BookAds and submitted another book. If there’s no significant change, it will mean another month wasted, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. I’ll pull out and persevere with BookBub ads. I am selling a few, but cling to something I read on one of my FB groups that summer is a bad time for selling books. I don’t think it makes any difference, but it could be true. My author colleague, Helen Christmas, who has written a crime series set in London covering a period of about thirty years or so, was chatting to me about the difficulty in grabbing the readers’ attention and getting sales. We agreed it’s a difficult game out there, and you just have to keep on trying. Helen’s series is called ‘Same Face, Different Place’. You can find her 5 book series on Amazon. She has terrific reviews too, so why not have a look, starting with Book 1 in the series? https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0078L8858

On the domestic front, we had lunch with our granddaughter Gemma and her son, Orin (our No.3 great grandson), at Worthing. It’s always good to see the little ones growing up, although it does remind you how time is passing by, so being able to spend some time with them is always a bonus. Last night, Saturday, was Bingo with Fish & Chips down at the village hall. Life can get so exciting at times, can’t it? I’m not a bingo fan but I go along to this three monthly event with Pat just to be sociable. And for the fish and chips of course! I managed to see the whole of the British Speedway Grand Prix from Cardiff too, which was also a bonus. Watched most of it before going out, and caught up with the last hour when we got home. Terrific evening of Speedway.

I pulled out of BookAds today; couldn’t see any point in waiting for my sales to “take off”. I can’t blame BookAds, even though I would like to, because my ad was getting plenty of impressions, so I guess it lacked something — not punchy enough? Not interesting enough? Yet this is a book that reached No.1 in Canada (yes, I’ll cling to anything to make it sound good), and had decent reviews, which means its back to the drawing board again. Wish me luck!

Oh, by the way, I dropped the price of my BBad for The Eagle’s Covenant to $0.99 yesterday and sold four books in 24 hours. Is someone telling me something?